1. The Child Language Lab at Macquarie University's Centre for Language Sciences has several positions for PhD students to conduct research on phonological and morphological development. We are especially interested in those with strong quantitative, experimental, and phonetics background to explore issues in early speech perception and production in typical, language/hearing impaired, bilingual, and L2 populations.

The Centre for Language Sciences (CLaS) is housed in the Linguistics Department at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. It has close connections with the Department of Cognitive Science, and is part of the new Centre of Excellence for Cognition and its Disorders. All will be soon housed in the Australian Hearing Hub - a state-of the art hearing and language research 'hub', with MEG, EEG, infant speech perception lab, language production lab (including ultrasound), eye- tracking, computational linguistics expertise, and many other research facilities.

The following two PhD projects are housed in the Department of Computing, working closely with an interdisciplinary team of researchers in the Linguistics Department and Macquarie University's Centre for Language Sciences. Applicants should have a good background in mathematics and computer science, and be willing to learn linguistics as required.

2. The first project involves developing computational models of human language acquisition. These models will be used to study synergies in the acquisition of one or more of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. The work involves novel computational approaches to modeling language acquisition, including hierarchical non-parametric Bayesian techniques.

3. The second project involves incremental syntactic parsing and coreference resolution. This project has both engineering and psycholinguistic implications, and the candidate can choose which to focus on. For example, incremental syntactic parsing and coreference resolution could be coupled with a speech recognition system as part of an on-line speech recognition and interpretation system. It could also be used to make predictions about on-line sentence comprehension as part of a psycholinguistic model.